Hundreds of students, faculty and visiting parents crowded in front of Dartmouth Hall on Saturday afternoon to hear the Aires a cappella group, joined by 80 Aires alumni, celebrate the group's 50th anniversary with an outdoor concert.
The Aires alumni represented all five decades and nearly every graduating class since the Aires' inception in 1946 as the College's first a cappella group.
On Friday evening, the current Aires were joined by the alumni, including three of the founding members, in two songs at the Spring Sing, an annual a cappella festival. The augmented group sang "Dartmouth Undying" and "Somewhere," from the musical West Side Story, which has become the song the Aires use to induct new members, Aires business manager Marc Bruni '99 said.
The mixed group of students and alumni rehearsed together on Saturday in preparation for the Aires All-Star Concert that afternoon. Current Aire Juan Carlos Martinez '97 said the most amazing part of the experience was hearing the echo of more than 90 voices holding a chord together.
Saturday night students and alumni shared stories about the origins of the Aires and its traditions at a banquet held at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
Martinez said the Aires were formed during the 1946-47 school year by Glee Club director Paul Zeller as an a cappella sub-set of the Glee Club called the "Injunaires," a pun on the College's mascot at the time.
Scott Davis '00, who organized the anniversary celebration, said the banquet gave the Aires alumni a chance to understand the reasons the group separated from the Glee Club in the late 1970s.
Davis said the alumni from the late 70s and early 80s had a very different perspective of the Glee Club director than did the men from the earlier Aires groups. Davis thought the group was able to understand the reasons for the split and appreciate the force that Zeller had been in the Aires.
"Last night at the banquet these guys would get up with their [fellow] Aires and they could sing songs they hadn't sung for 15 or 20 years," Martinez said.
"'Round the girdled earth they roamed, but they came back because of this one thing that we all did in college that binds us together," Aires director Jason Fleming '98 said.
Martinez said the group is working on putting together a 50th anniversary CD called "Airelooms" that will contain cuts from the last 20 Aires recordings and the two songs the group performed together at Spring Sing.
Davis said the group is excited about the alumni support they have received. Of approximately 200 Aires alumni they were able to contact, about 120 responded and 80 were able to come to Dartmouth for the weekend.
